For My Next Trick ...

Having made enough apple pectin to keep me gelling for at least - oh - the next day or two, I had remaining rather a lot of pulp, skin and seeds.

Since I am now the very epitome of frugality and thrift, I decided to recycle them into a thick apple sauce, heady with vanilla and cinnamon.

Normally, I would get out my trusty food processor, fit it with its fearsome steel blade and do my worst.

But not this time! This time, I had a new kitchen implement to try, sent to me by my dear friend Toad, preserver of note and kitchen equipment aficionado.

She had earlier reported to me that she had a new attachment for her standmixer - a cunning fruit and vegetable strainer/grinder arrangement that she had begun using for her own jam-making with great success (One doesn't want seeds in one's jam now, does one? They stick in one's teeth so annoyingly!). She reported that this improvement to her culinary life had left her old food mill surplus to requirements and destined for her next garage sale.

I begged her to hold onto it so I could retrieve it at some future date (why sell it to a stranger when you can bequeath it to a friend?) and, Toad being Toad, she sent it to me with her latest batch of raspberry and chocolate jam, oh my.

It is a contraption beyond my wildest imaginings. It took the Squid and me a full ten minutes and all our engineering chops to reconstruct, but when we were finished, I felt like I had an honest-to-gosh heirloom in the house:

Naturally, I decided to make my apple sauce using this fabulous new device.

Having become a dab hand at putting the thing together, I popped in its coarsest disk and set to work. It made excellent puree des pommes, no denying it - although it ground up rather than strained out the seeds (I suppose I must use a finer disk in future). A quick web trawl revealed that apple seeds are not actually poisonous, so I decided not to worry about them. I spooned the mixture into my biggest pan and heated it up, adding sugar and spice to taste. I cooked it until it was very thick and mounded on my wooden spoon. I processed it in several of my pint-sized Ball jars because it gives me great satisfaction to vacuum stuff these days.

The result was rich and delicious and will serve admirably in the whole host of applications for which good thick apple sauce is justly famous, not to mention gluten-free desserts such as Mrs. Beeton's Apple Snow. 

And, true to my stem-to-root philosophy these days, I used every last molecule of Sir's rejected Granny Smiths.

Can you believe both these jars (jelly on the left, apple sauce on the right)
came from the same preserving pan?

Neither can I.

It's ... like ... magic!